


Tend to me

by jestbee



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF), fall whisperer
Genre: AU, AU of an AU, Fic of Fic, Friends With Benefits, M/M, meta fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 11:30:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20834744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jestbee/pseuds/jestbee
Summary: Dye tends to things, and they bloom





	Tend to me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [intoapuddle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intoapuddle/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Monochrome](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19253134) by [intoapuddle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intoapuddle/pseuds/intoapuddle). 

> Happy Birthday, Puddle. 
> 
> I borrowed your characters for a bit, I hope that's okay.

Dye tends to things, and they bloom. 

Under a cloudless sky, Dye bends over a bed of plants and grasps silky leaves in his fingers. He strokes them, sprinkles water on the soil and listens to the rustle of fronds in the breeze. The garden is safe, but the whisper of something swirls at the edges, mingled with the sound of the wind.

He swipes a strand of hair from his forehead, tucking it back behind his ear. His back aches as he stands upright, swinging a watering can, now empty, from one hand. 

"Do you ever leave?" A voice calls over his shoulder. 

Dye closes his eyes for half a second and wonders how long it will be before he gives in this time. He schools his face, wiping from it anything that might have been there. 

"I leave," he says, "Sometimes."

White is standing on the other side of the fence. Wind shifts his hair, moving it fluidly around the headphones resting on his neck. The whispers say things, and Dye ignores them. 

"What do you want?" Dye asks. 

White shrugs. He looks tired, shoulders tense and readied, held taut like every sinew in his body knows what it means to be prepared for what might come. Dye flexes a hand around his watering can. 

"Can I come in?" 

Dye offers his palm in the direction of the gate and White makes his way round. Once he's on the other side, the air comes out of him. He deflates. 

He has grey under his eyes, smudges of the energy sapped from him. His shirt has a loose thread at the hem, trailing. 

"Come on," Dye says. 

They make their way wordlessly into the house. Usually Dye would make more of an effort to prolong the bit that comes before what will inevitably happen once they are inside, but he suspects that White doesn't have the energy for it today. 

Whatever the caves have brought him, the things he speaks only into the spaces between conversations, Dye and his plants can be the relief from. 

Protection too, but that comes later. 

"You're quiet today," White says when they're inside. 

Dye boils water and turns his back. There's trust in that act alone and he doesn't have to think too far back to a time when he wouldn't have done it so easily. 

"So are you," Dye says. 

He hears the sound of White sitting in his chair, of the soft sigh escaping his lips. 

"What are you doing?" White says. 

"I--" Dye frowns at the cups on the side, at the pile of plants he has waiting like he'd known White would come by today. 

He hadn't, he never knows for certain. But sometimes he could swear the whispers change, something shifts, and White is standing on the other side of his fence. 

"I don't know." 

White holds out an arm, extended down, shirt ruffled and exposing his delicate wrist. 

"Come here," he says. 

"Why?" 

White's hand drops back to his lap. His fingers curl into the fabric at his knee, another rip, something come away under stress. Everything about him is unravelling, falling loose. Dye wants to hold him together. 

"You know why," White says. 

Dye does. They've been doing this for a while, finding solace and comfort in each other, but it isn't usually like this. 

White is the sort to hide behind barbed words and snippy comments, Dye is the type to steel himself against it and pretend it doesn't affect him at all. 

The bit that comes before this, before White looks at him from beneath pale lashes and when Dye walks over to him, it should last longer. But White is tired, and Dye doesn't have anything to steel himself against. 

The whispers quiet when he's next to White. Pale fingers loops around his wrist, forefinger and thumb, and a sharp flex of lithe muscle in White's arm pulls him down. Dye folds, curving into the space on White's lap. 

He's been here before, he fits. His tunic rucks up to the probing insistence of White's fingers and Dye tips forward, presses his forehead against White's temple. He breathes hot across White's cheekbone, the stray strand of his hair escaping from its place behind his ear and grazing White's cupid's bow. 

White lifts his mouth and Dye goes easily to that too. 

"Why?" Dye says as they part. 

He hasn't thought to ask before. Too busy pretending he didn't want this with every fibre of him, but he needs to know. 

He'd found White, bloodied and wrecked at the mouth of a cave. He had found him and brought him back, right here, and like everything else he'd tended to him. 

Dye tends to things, and they bloom. 

White blooms for him now, pink under his pale cheeks, red inside his mouth as he opens to answer. 

"Never mind," Dye says, "I don't care." 

"Because," White says, anyway. He never listens, he's never let Dye get his way before so why should he now. "It's quiet with you."

Dye can hear the wind outside, the movement of plants against fences, leaves and stems and petals waving, but nothing else. 

He kisses White again and presses into his skin everything he isn't saying. It's quiet with White, everything at bay and held back. 

It's a manufactured silence. Dye knows that shadows aren't held back by White's presence alone, it takes more, so much more, to make them retreat. It's a fight, a quest, something bigger than just the two of them breathing the same air.

White, here, makes him believe that it's a fight they can win. 

Noise fades, quiet descends. With White in his arms the whispers fall, just for a moment. 

Dye kisses him again, breath bound up in his chest. Their clothes come off piece by piece, and they hide their thoughts in warm skin and wandering hands. Dye sinks his mouth down onto White and White tips his pale head back on the chair. 

He moans loud and long and it rings out in the silence. Dye doesn't care if this is all it is, if all they get is a few moments of relief amidst a never ending fight. He's going to savour it. 

Then, after, he'll send White away with the plants he needs to keep himself safe, and head back into his garden with everything he didn't say caught up in his throat. He aches with it sometimes, words bitten back, the whispers taking over and giving him the kind of silence he hates. His own, drowned out with the harsh things they say.

What would it be like to say it just once, to bare his soul the way he bares himself now. White takes his hand and pulls him to the bedroom, knowing the way to Dye's small bed without needing to ask. He's been here before, he'll be here again. He leaves, always, the protection he needs and the silence along with him. 

He can't say it, and so he parts his thighs and lets White in with a reckless abandon he can't find it in himself to regret. 

After, the sweat cooling on their skin and Dye's hair fanned out over a pillow White is laying on, White breaks the silence. 

"You have to leave that garden some time." 

Dye looks at him. He really looks, at the lines in the corners of his mouth, the scars and the smudges under his eyes. White smiles at him, a tiny pull of his lips, and Dye kisses him once. They're still in the silence, he's still allowed. 

"I leave the garden," Dye says. "Just because I don't insist on wandering into certain death like you." 

"It isn't certain death," White says, the tips of his fingers tracing the rise of Dye's hipbone, "I come back don't I?" 

Dye blinks. White is pale and spread on his sheets. He rolls over, close to his side so that he can feel the warmth of his skin. They've been closer than this, even minutes ago they were closer and yet— this feels more than he should be allowed. 

"I always come back," White says. 

He takes Dye's chin between his thumb and fingertips. The pad of his thumb smears against Dye's bottom lip and Dye's mouth purses without him intending to, pressing a gentle, chaste kiss against the roughened skin. 

"What if you don't?"

The words huff against White's fingers, the salty tang of sweat-tinged skin on Dye's tongue. Dye can't help himself, he spreads his hand along the firm plane of White's stomach, mapping the shift of muscle as he breathes. When he looks up, White is looking at him with an expression he can't place, confusion and awe. Something like disbelief. 

He smiles, his face breaking, the usual facade of well-aimed jabs melting out from under it. Dye draws circles with his hand and White pushes into the touch. 

"I always come back," White repeats. 

"Yeah," Dye says, ankle slotting between White's shins, "you do." 

White usually leaves. He takes his plants and he leaves. Dye tends to things and they bloom, but after that there is the harvest, and they are gone. He's used to this cycle, to pouring his care into something, only for it to disappear. He's used to White doing the same. 

White doesn't leave. He slides his arm over the dip of Dye's waist and runs his fingers through the trailing strands of blue hair escaping Dye's braid. 

"Your plants are in the kitchen," Dye says. 

"Hm." 

White has his eyes closed, the thin purple veins spidery in the thin skin of his eyelids. He is tired, body lax against Dye's bed. 

"White?" 

"Kitchen," White says, "Yeah. Got it." 

He pulls Dye closer and presses his mouth blindly against any part of him he can reach. The kiss lands on Dye's cheek, warm and fond. 

"White?" Dye repeats.

"Shh." 

"But don't you have to—" 

"I don't have to do anything," White says, "Unless you want me to?" 

White still has his eyes closed, but Dye can feel the tension in his arms, the way he's holding himself still. Steeled against something. 

Dye tucks his head under White's chin, rolling ever closer. "I don't," Dye says, "stay." 

"Hm." 

White is already asleep. Exhausted and holding Dye close. Dye wants to keep him here, to grow the plants and keep the shadows at bay. He wants the silence and the whispers far away, but he knows that isn't who White is. White fights, he goes to the cave and braves the shadows because that's who he is. He takes the plants Dye gives him and with them he can do what he's meant to. 

With White, Dye feels like he can do what he's meant to. 

This might be all they get. Fleeting moments in the garden, stolen silence in between battles. This might just be that same cycle, bloom and leave, and Dye might be trapped in it.

White is right. Dye needs to leave the garden one day, he needs to do more than build up his defenses. He's already let White into the garden, maybe he'll let White lead him out of it. 

He tends to things, and they bloom. He tends to them and they leave, but maybe this time he'll go with them.

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU of Puddle's AU and in no way canon for that universe. I want to be in the Fall Whisperer fandom tbh, so here's a fic I would have written for it if I were. 
> 
> Posted with permission from Puddle herself, who read it before I did.


End file.
